86 practices of the other employees. When another friend first met Bowe at Cha Chàs, he was bunching up newspaper into balls, setting the balls on fire, and throwing them off the balcony onto the crowd below. Cha Cha's was run by Maria Malla Pasta and Scarlett Bordello. Bowery became infatuated with Scar- lett-who wore real chicken fèet as ear- rings-even going so far as to try to find a man who would sleep with her in order to tell him about it. I t was during this quest that he fell for a seventeen-year-old artist named Trojan, who became the unrequited love of his life. Trojan admired Bowery, but he was not interested in him romanti- cally. Rachel Auburn remembers Bow- ery's efforts to wear Trojan down: "He would say to Trojan, 'If you have it off with me it will be out of my system. It's this whole Freudian thing I've got.' " This tactic was only occasionally successful. Nevertheless, the two became room- mates in a council flat in the East End. (Trojan had acquired the apartment by setting his previous council flat on fire, thereby making himself eligible for a new residence.) They put up "Star Trek" wallpaper, and installed blue vinyl chairs in the living room. Bowery covered his bedroom walls with mirrored tiles. As Tilley recounts, they also fixed the door- bell to play sex sounds, but with mixed results. Bowery explained, "Every time someone pressed the bell and I heard all the gasping and moaning, I just thought it was Trojan having an asthma attack, so I never bothered to answer the door." ^ LTHOUGH Bowery did not refer .L\.. to himself as a designer, it was as a designer that he first attracted no- tice, both in and out of London. After he was fired from Burger King (for stealing), he went on the dole and began to earn extra money by making one-off outfits for friends. He used what was at hand (often cheap curtain fabric), transforming it into high-water trousers and extrav- agant shirts with oversized collars, big puffy shoulders, and detailed pocketing. In 1983 and 1984, he was invited by the event impresario Susanne Bartsch to be part of shows in New York and Japan an- nouncing the new British fashion. Both Charivari and Barneys became interested in marketing Bowery's wares, but he had neither the backing nor the inclination to get his work mass-produced. "Fashion is a business, first of all," he would say later on, in a television interview. "You have to appeal to too many people." On his return to London from New York in 1983, Bowery further radi- calized his appearance. He began to cre- ate what he called the "Paki from Outer Space" look, so named because it was in part inspired by his fondness for cheap Indian cloth and jewelt}r. This look included platform shoes, painted silver or bronze; bright-colored striped stockings; an oversized striped tunic, sometimes with an enormous star on the front; tall hats with a swatch of fake hair at- tached at the back; and blue, green, or red face paint, with Hindi inscriptions across the forehead. A nose ring with a chain stretching from the nose to the ear was also sometimes part of the look. At first, Bowery was too shy to wear the Paki look himself: and he used Trojan as a model, but soon his exhibitionism outweighed his self-consciousness, and he began sporting it regularly at the clubs that he and Trojan frequented: Asylum, the Pink Panther, White Trash. Gone were the Vivienne Westwood influences; gone, too, were his somewhat half- hearted attempts to run anything ap- proaching a design business. With the Pala look, Bowery had committed him- self to the total theatricalization of the self: using the night club as his stage. I t was this look that first attracted the then twenty-one-year-old British chore- ographer Michael Clark, who was being heralded as the new Nijinsky: Clark later explained, "Classical ballet is all about beauty. And Leigh's work, I think. . . challenges the conventional view of what looks good." Michael Clark hired Bow- ery, providing a more formal setting for his work. In Clark's dances, which were accompanied by loud rock music by the Fall and fantastical sets designed by Charles Atlas, Bowery exercised his brand of haute-couture surrealism. Each of his costumes was beautifully cut and exquisitèl y assembled. Dancers wore caps with little wiglets attached at the back, silver platform shoes, ruffled see-through aprons, loud briefs, knee socks, and THE NEW YORKER, MARCH 30. 1998 stretchy knit tights with the ass missing. (This was at least eight years before the English designer Alexander McQyeen would come out with his "bumsters.") Perhaps in recognition of the fact that Bowery's creations were becoming more and more bound to his physical self: Clark asked him to appear in the work. Eventually, Bowery would become a regular fixture on Clark's stage. Some- times he was little more than an object, bearded, veiled, and dressed in yards of brown tulle, wi th gaffer's tape applied to his middle. At other times, he played the piano, danced, or commented on the other members of the company. I N 1985, while Bowery was work- ing for Clark and designing for friends, the club entrepreneur Tony Gor- don invited Bowery to become the public face of Taboo, a small Thursday-night club-within-a-club, with mirrored balls and video screens, on Leicester Square. According to Tilley; the club's ethos was "dress as though your life depends on it, or don't bother." Marc Vaultier, who minded the door, would stick a mirror in the faces of those waiting outside and say; "Would you let yourself in?" With Bowery as an attraction, Gordon hoped to make Taboo the most branché club in London, and he succeeded. Soon the regulars-whom one club observer re- ferred to as the dole-er-crats ("They live like aristocrats . . . rising late and existing on exotic forms of cheese on toast")- were joined by celebrities like John Gal- liano, Sade, Derek Jarman, and Boy George. The British journalist Alix Sharkey described Taboo as "London's sleaziest, campest, and bitchiest club of the moment. . . stuffed with designers, stylists, models, students, dregs, and the hopefully hip, lurching through the lasers and snarfing up amyl." In a September, 1985', magazine in- terview, Bowery described his role at Taboo as "a sort of local cabaret act, I suppose-the original vaudeville drunk- ard." He went on, "If people see me be- having in such an outrageous manner, they won't feel inhibited themselves." But he was becoming increasingly aware of his social power. One cherished bit of Bowery lore describes Bowery bumping up against Mick Jagger: Jagger spewed, "Fuck off, freak," to which Bowery coun- tered, "Fuck off, fossil." At the same time, Bowery was famous for his largesse at the